Fig. 4

a Intraindividual dissimilarity in gut bacterial composition was lower than interindividual dissimilarity. b When all individuals were analyzed together, intraindividual dissimilarity expressed with the Bray-Curtis index increased rapidly over a few days before reaching a steady state when pairwise sample dissimilarity did not increase anymore, even for samples collected more than a year apart. c Composition stability expressed as the correlation coefficient between intraindividual dissimilarity and time gap between sample collection (measured in days). Female’s stability coefficients are depicted for young adult (6–10), mid-aged (> 10 and < 18), and old (≥ 18) females (boxes and whiskers), with more positive values indicating lower stability. Boxes represent the interquartile range (IQ), which contains the middle 50% of the records, and a line across the box indicates the median. Vertical lines extend from the upper and lower edges of the box to the highest and lowest values which are no greater than 1.5 times the IQ range. Circles represent outliers